Political parties reflect the
societies within which they operate. Competition between parties –
in pursuit of resources, power and, occasionally, prestige – is
very much based on the competition that occurs between the different
social groups that exist within a society. In the new European
democracies of the 1920s, the contemporary party systems that emerged
were

PROBLEM-SOLVING WORKSHOP conflict resolution is a form of
peaceful third-party intervention. The approach argues that it differs
from the traditional approaches to mediation in many respects. It
assumes, for example, that conflicts can be best resolved in small-group
discussions which are guided by facilitators. The role of the
facilitator is to assist the parties to communicate rather than to

the dynamics that might bring it under pressure, be they significant events, the specific organisations targeted for proscription, party political allegiances, or even whether contributors to these debates positioned themselves as advocates or critics of the UK’s proscription regime.
In this chapter, we bring all of this together by asking, in light of the above: what, exactly, should we make of parliamentary proscription debates and their apparent stability over time? Our answer (hinted at in the chapter title!) involves further reflection on three important

’ with the Tamil political project by successive Sri Lankan governments has produced a political culture in which the main (Sinhala) parties routinely vie to adopt more hard-line positions on the ‘ethnic question’ a practice which began as long ago as 1956. (Nadarajah and Sriskandarajah 2005 , 98)
A similar dynamic of postcolonial discomfit remains in India where the state has variously clashed with localised secessionist groups including Maoist Naxalites in northeast India and the Khalistan movement in the Punjab. In the Middle East, too, a litany of armed groups

a new form of justice that is associated with the authority
of a judge passing impartial judgment. The suit of the individual, the antagonism and the dialogue between the parties, the
responsibility that comes with action, the significance and consequences of the decision, the questions and mysteries of interpretation –​ these are structural elements of both tragedy and
law. The basic elements of tragedy correspond to the basic elements of the new theory and praxis of justice that emerge concurrently: justice as law.
But the connection between tragedy and law

(e.g., the state of nature qua mental experiment) to be violently subjected to lawful regulation. This is what Menke understands
as “the fate of law.”
Drawing on the history of tragedy, Menke starts out by highlighting the transition from the “justice of retribution” (exemplified by
Agamemnon) to the “justice of the law” (exemplified by Eumenides).
In the justice-​of-​retribution paradigm each party is judge in his or in
her own case and the balance of retribution is in fact never achieved
because what for one party counts as a justice-​restoring act of retribution

1899 in order to consolidate British colonial rule 2 are today employed by the Malaysian government to outlaw opponents that attract its displeasure. In 2015, for instance, Malaysia’s Registrar of Societies had rejected 38 per cent of all applications to form societies, which included the opposition Democratic Action Party’s central executive committee and 120 party branches. 3 Nineteenth-century colonial provisions instituted in Hong Kong, similarly, remain in use today and are usually deployed to threaten the banning of organisations connected with Taiwan or

since it emerges out of tragedy as the
representation of proceedings, of a trial that suspends the immediacy of
activity, and since art, especially drama, proves crucial to the law’s effort
to attain the kind of self-​reflexivity that alone elevates it above the body
and its violence, above immediacy, stupidity, naivety. When the law
wrests itself from retribution, it creates a homogeneous sphere in which
parties treated as equal follow a distancing and qualifying procedure
that leads up to a decision, the settlement of the dispute. Each party
recognizes the other

Towards a re-thinking of legal justice in transitional justice contexts

María del Rosario Acosta López

crime with a
comparable response –​a reproduction therefore of violence rather than
a radical interruption of its effects –​marks retributive justice’s essential
ambivalence or equivocation. “Retribution,” Menke writes, “harbors
an equivocation that lets its justice disintegrate into an undecidable
strife between enemy parties” (p. 10). Retribution has no answer to this
undecidability, because it can only take into account one of the two
sides at a time. By doing so, retributive justice is incapable of interrupting the cycle of vengeance it was set up to suspend. Its

This book is a critical study of John Burton's work, which outlines an alternative framework for the study of international conflict, and re-examines conflict resolution. It argues that culture has a constitutive role in international conflict and conflict resolution. The book provides an overview of the mediation literature in order to locate problem-solving workshop conflict resolution within the context of peaceful third-party involvement. It analyses human needs thinking and examines the similarities between it and Burton's thinking. The book also examines the logic of Burton's argument by means of metaphor analysis, by analysing the metaphors which can be found in his human needs theory. It studies further Burton's views of action and rationality, and moves into phenomenology and social constructionism. The book takes as its starting-point a totalist theory of international conflict resolution, namely Burton's sociobiologically-oriented conflict theory, and demonstrates the logic of argument and the denial of culture underlying his problem-solving theory. It explains the dimensions of the social world in order to lay a foundation for the study of conflict and conflict resolution from the social constructionist perspective. The book presents a phenomenological understanding of conflict and problem-solving conflict resolution. Finally, it argues that problem-solving workshop conflict resolution can be best understood as an attempt to find a shared reality between the parties in conflict.